mySociety design tips: every page is the home page

If you’re building any civic or democratic website, we know that you’ll want to make its homepage beautiful and unique. After all, you want to make a good impression on your users, and first impressions are the ones that count.

Go ahead! Dive in and make it special… but also take our advice and don’t burn all your energy on building a perfect homepage. The reason why is that many of your users will come to your site without ever seeing your homepage.

The main reason for this is the influence of search engines, Twitter and Facebook. These have already changed users’ behaviour during the short history of the World Wide Web: there was a time when people could be expected to start on the front of your site and work inwards, clicking on the links you provided, step by step. But several  things now work against this: search engine results link to pages deep within your website; links are easily and routinely shared (email, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, even QR codes); and people are becoming accustomed to simple URLs that they might compose by hand, such as mysociety.org/contact. Realistically you must expect a user’s first page to be any* page on your website.

This means that, on every page except the homepage, your users may have arrived without any context or history — and, importantly, without the benefit of all the fabulous design time you’ve put into that glorious homepage.

teleport_by_mercurialn

“Teleport” by mercurialn (CC BY-NC-ND licensed from Flickr)

Spend some time thinking about how you are treating those people. Imagine they’ve been teleported into a strange land; they know, roughly, what planet they’re on, but otherwise it’s all new to them. That’s how bewildering this could be to a user who’s clicked on a link that drops them deep into your website. It’s a common experience and it’s easy to get right, but if you get it wrong, they will just as easily teleport out again. And they will think: “that is not somewhere I want to visit again.”

None of this is very radical. But the point is that it’s very easy to overlook — especially because, if you’re one of the developers working on a site, you already know too much about how it works to be objective when you look at what you’ve made.

Here are some things you should consider:

  • Do your pages instantly say what they’re for? A new user landing on an unfamiliar page will grope for some explanation – “This is a page about a politician”, or “This is a page about problems in this street”. You need to make sure you spell it out somewhere easy to see.
  • Can the user easily take an action from this page? If the user was looking for more than just a quick hit of information, the chances are that they want to get something done. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming that, just because they’ve landed on this page, this is the page where they want to be. For example, if you look at any one problem report on FixMyStreet and you will find a big “Report a problem” link in yellow at the top of the page.

So you should of course create a beautiful, functional homepage, but you should never forget that almost every page on your website will be a homepage for someone.

* Technical note: as you’d expect, there are a few exceptions to this (admin pages and so on), but in general all our sites deliberately offer their data pages with URLs that allow such indexing.